Tie Backup And Archive Together To Grow Sales
How many times have your customers said, "I'm already backing up my data. Why do I need an archival storage solution?" That answer is common and is a telltale sign that VARs are not doing a good job of defining the differences between those solutions. Here are a few suggestions I developed with the help of Spectra Logic that will help you to clearly define each technology when communicating with your customers.
The backup process provides data protection against full system data loss or corruption. The full and/or sequential copies of data sets are not designed for frequent access. In contrast, an archive provides data retention, but with enhanced data retrieval abilities. Archives are designed for frequent access to data at a lower cost than primary (disk array) storage, while requiring less physical space to store data than primary storage arrays.
An archive's ability to randomly access data using a keyword search is the biggest difference between archive and backup technologies. In addition, backup media is often located off-site and must be located and transported to the data center before data recovery can be performed. An archive provides the nearline capability to search for data files and retrieve them quickly when compared to tape backup.
Backup and recovery technologies are not new, and data archives have been around long before the advent of the computer. However, archive appliances are getting more attention due to government regulations — many of which define specific requirements for data retention and retrieval. Your opportunity is to clearly define the differences between the technologies and then sell them to complement each other. For instance, many archival storage appliances can be configured to work in conjunction with a tape backup system to provide both archival and backup services in a single process.
If your customers still don't get it, present them with a mock legal discovery scenario where they must produce all e-mail messages, documents, and correspondence tied to a specific customer. Ask them how long it would take to pull all of that information together without an archive. That should get their attention. To summarize: Sell backup solutions to provide data protection. Sell data archive solutions to provide data retention. Sell both to differentiate yourself from other VARs.